"Do you like my hat?"

 

"Do you like my hat?"  Elise asked, holding two dolls over her head in an appearance that could pass for a fascinator in the Royal Family.

"I do not like your hat!"  I replied.

"Good-bye!"  Elise said and began to laugh.

"Good-bye!"  I said.

While this may sound like the sort of father-daughter interaction that is bound, in a few years, to result in a sequel to the book "Spare," the truth was far from it.  I was only following the script my three year old daughter expected of me.

True fans of hifalutin literature will, perhaps recognize the quotation as being from the book "Go, Dog, Go!"  This classic of children's lit, by the Shakespeare of that genre, P.D. Eastman, contains a myriad of short vignettes about a group of dogs.

One recurring story line involves two dogs, one of whom has a different hat each time.  She asks the first dog if he likes her hat.  The second dog never does like the hat in question until, in the bewitching last scene, he is enthralled with the hat in question.  At this point the two dogs drive off into the sunset together.

It is interesting that the ultimate peak of love in this story revolves around learning to accept someone else's fashion choices.  It sort of glosses over all of the other aspects of knowing someone and learning to love them.

Love is something so simple that even a child can understand it.  It is also so complex that even a Mensa level genius would struggle to explain it.

Love is the thing that lets a man gently answer the same question from his demented wife for the twentieth time in an evening.  It is the essence that lets a Dad play along with a script from "Go, Dog, Go!" simply because his three year old daughter finds it funny.

Love give us patience with the interminable.  It give us a desire to heal broken relationships.  It gives us an understanding of others in our lives who are confusing -- even when we never learn to like their hats.